A mud-caked buck appears out of nowhere, his legs stained from the bog. The deer scans its surroundings. He’s an old deer that knows just how perilous life can be outside the security of his swamp.

Would you go 180 miles away to hunt deer — if you had them in your own backyard? Probably not, unless you had buck fever. I don’t mean the acute kind that leaves you trying to swallow your Adam’s ...

Not long ago, the hardest thing about big buck hunting was simply that mature whitetails were so scarce. In most states, the vast majority of bucks were killed the first year they wore visible antlers ...

THE FIRST DEER I ever killed came to me, but I was in a good place, walking a few steps at a time and making frequent stops, and looking more than moving. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen him. That’s a ...